Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Elizabeth Ezra

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252075223, 9780252033186
• eBook ISBN: 9780252091155
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This is the first book on Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the popular and critically acclaimed director of films such as Amélie, Delicatessen, A Very Long Engagement, Alien Resurrection, and City of Lost Children. Jeunet's work exemplifies Europe's engagement with Hollywood, while at the same time making him a figurehead of the critically overlooked, specifically French tradition of the cinema of the fantastic.

Having garnered both commercial success and critical esteem in genres such as science fiction, fantasy, romantic comedy, and the war epic, Jeunet's work nevertheless engages with key aspects of French history and contemporary French culture. This study analyzes the director's major films, including those he made with Marc Caro, and his early short works. Elizabeth Ezra brings a new perspective to the study of Jeunet's work, uncovering instances of repressed historical trauma involving France's role in Algeria and the Second World War. The book includes a commentary by Jeunet himself on his career and corpus of films.

Prosthetic Visions |

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is that rare breed, a popular auteur. He has written or cowritten all but one of the screenplays for the films he has directed and has maintained a high degree of creative control over his projects, which bear his distinctive stylistic stamp and have been generally well regarded by critics. At the same time, his films have attracted increasingly large audiences, with accordingly expanding budgets. Yet his success is also his Achilles’ heel: his popularity with audiences has tended to marginalize him among film scholars and academics, some of whom regard his films with suspicion. Critics have dismissed Jeunet for what they see as his privileging of form over content. Yet this form itself contains a great deal of substance. Jeunet’s films are historically resonant in their association with the late twentieth-century French film style known as the cinéma du look and in their persistent allusions—even within films set in a postapocalyptic future, which nonetheless manage to look like costume dramas—to earlier film movements such as German expressionism, French poetic realism, and the French New Wave. Jeunet’s films thematize issues such as the technological mediation of social relations, cultural anxieties surrounding advances in biotechnology, and the repression and subsequent revelation of historical trauma, especially in the context of war and decolonization. Looking to the past and the future, his films invariably express the millennial anxieties and preoccupations of the present.

Jeunet’s work also exemplifies the expanding transnational dimension of French cinema not only by virtue of the global box-office success of his films but also because of the director’s increasing engagement with Hollywood. Jeunet’s first feature film, Delicatessen (1991), codirected with Marc Caro, made an impression among film buffs and developed a cult status outside of France, but it was not a blockbuster. La Cité des enfants perdus (The city of lost children; 1995), the second (and, to date, the last) film Jeunet made with Caro, initially remained obscure outside of France (though its cult following grew steadily in the first years of the 2000s), but its international credentials were established by virtue of its American lead actor, Ron Perlman, who played the role with heavily accented French. Soon thereafter, Jeunet went to Hollywood to make Alien Resurrection (1997), bringing with him some of the French technicians and actors with whom he had begun to form a company of sorts. Jeunet then returned to France to make Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie, 2001), a relatively small-scale French film that was an enormous domestic and international success and that, much more than the big-budget Alien Resurrection, put Jeunet’s name on the global cinematic map. His next film, Un Long dimanche de fiançailles (A very long engagement; 2004), despite being shot in France, in French, with a virtually all-French cast and crew (though it did feature an extended cameo by the Hollywood star Jodie Foster), was the subject of a protracted legal battle to determine whether the film, which was partly financed by the French arm of Warner Brothers, was “French” enough to receive state subsidies. For his next film, The Life of Pi (still in production as this book went to press), which he made after turning down an offer to make the fourth Harry Potter film, Jeunet literally and figuratively returned to Hollywood.

Jeunet never attended film school; he is entirely self-taught. Born in 1953 in Roanne, he came from a modest background. His father worked for the phone company, and his mother was a schoolteacher. He began making animated films while working for the telephone company and then graduated to filmed advertisements and music videos. Jeunet’s career has been defined by a series of collaborative partnerships, some more long-standing than others. Of these working relationships, perhaps the most influential was his collaboration with the illustrator and graphic artist Marc Caro. Jeunet met Caro at an animation festival in Annecy in the 1970s, and the pair clicked right away. They made two short animated puppet films together, L’évasion (The escape; 1978) and Le manège (The carousel; 1979), before going on to make two more short films in the 1980s, Le Bunker de la dernière rafale (The bunker of the last gunshots; 1981) and Pas de repos pour Billy Brakko (No rest for Billy Brakko; 1983). Marc Caro has described the way in which he and Jeunet complement each other: “[Jeunet] loves Charlie Chaplin, whereas I love Buster Keaton; he loves Truffaut, while I love Jacques Tati; he likes dogs, and I like cats. What we have most in common is the love of making things. It’s true that we had this desire, more than anything else, to make a film, rather than simply to help another director or filmmaker” (Drubigny).

The pair’s feature debut, Delicatessen, launched both their careers, and their second feature-length film, the visually opulent Cité des enfants perdus, solidified their reputation as filmmakers with a strong visual aesthetic, a predilection for dystopian fantasy, and an off-kilter sense of humor. Both films credited Jeunet and Caro as codirectors, and the filmmakers worked in tandem, with Caro taking more responsibility for the films’ visual style and Jeunet working more with the actors. Caro has explained their working relationship thus: “Jean-Pierre handles the direction in the traditional sense of the word, that is, the direction of the actors, etc., while I do the artistic direction. Beyond that, in the day-to-day workings of the shoot or preproduction, it’s obviously much more of a mixture. We write together, film together, edit together. According to each of our specialties, sometimes we’ll be drawn to what we do best. There’s a real complicity between us” (Debemardi).

This almost symbiotic partnership—like that of the conjoined twins in La Cité des enfants perdus, who finish each other’s sentences and scratch each other’s arms—came to an end when Jeunet and Caro were offered the chance to direct the fourth Alien film. Caro was not interested in working on a film over which he lacked creative control, whereas Jeunet relished the challenges and constraints that come with working on a big-budget Hollywood movie. Although Caro was eventually persuaded to spend three weeks in Hollywood doing some costume and set design for the film, he then parted company with Jeunet to pursue a solo career in illustration and computer graphics. Caro subsequently declined to participate in any of the “making-of” documentaries or interviews to accompany the DVD editions of the pair’s films, and the two have not worked together since. This parting of ways could perhaps have been foreseen in their differing responses when asked, in a joint interview, “Cinematically, what are your aspirations?” Caro replied, “I feel I’d like to explore other narrative forms, ones in which there’s a little media interactivity. What especially interests me is developing universes, and multimedia can enable me to explore a universe that I will construct.” Jeunet responded somewhat differently: “I’d like to continue writing screenplays . . . something like Forrest Gump, where the special effects aren’t necessarily seen but can enable things to be done that couldn’t have been, previously . . . in turn, reviving the writing, in proposing new things, thanks to the new techniques” (Schlockoff and Karani).

Other members of Jeunet’s coterie have maintained closer ties with the director. The producer Claudie Ossard, who helped Jeunet and Caro finance Delicatessen, stayed with Jeunet throughout the next decade of his career, producing his two subsequent French films. Pierre-Jacques Bénichou has worked as casting director on all Jeunet’s films except for Alien Resurrection, when there was a Hollywood casting director in place. The special-effects supervisor Pitof, who has worked on several of Jeunet’s films, and the director of photography Darius Khondji, who had worked on Delicatessen and La Cité des enfants perdus, went with Jeunet to Hollywood to work on Alien Resurrection. The set designer Jean Rabasse and the set decorator Aline Bonetto have worked on all of Jeunet’s French films, as have the screenwriters Guillaume Laurant and Gilles Adrian. Bruno Delbonnel has worked on all of Jeunet’s films in several different roles, from screenwriter and sound technician to director of photography. Several actors have appeared in more than one of Jeunet’s films, including the late Ticky Holgado, Serge Merlin, Rufus, Ron Perlman, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Audrey Tautou, and Dominique Bettenfeld. Dominique Pinon has acted in all of the director’s feature films as well as the short film Foutaises (Trifles; 1990).

Jeunet has been at the cutting edge of French cinema’s use of computer-generated images (CGI) and digital technology to produce special effects. At the time of its release in 1995, La Cité des enfants perdus could boast the greatest number of digital effects of any French film ever made. Marc Caro has recalled working on that film and the sea change that the advent of digital technology made possible: “We came from the world of animation, where you’re used to doing everything image by image. . . . And then, digital technology came along and turned everything upside down, and hit us over the head, but at the same time, we were partly responsible for it, actively participating in the innovation—it’s really fascinating. You sort of get that feeling of pride that ‘pioneers’ sometimes have” (Drubigny). When Jeunet went on to release Amélie in France in 2001, it was the film’s use of digital technology to transform Paris into an idealized version of itself that attracted the most attention. Digital technology allowed Jeunet both to film on location and to transform his locations into an enormous set. This blend of authenticity and artifice evokes aspects of the 1980s and 1990s cinéma du look, the late 1950s and early 1960s French New Wave, and the big-budget, postwar cinéma de qualité. What is distinctive about Jeunet’s films is the way they combine the past and the present to create a style that is discernible across all his films, even the two he made with Marc Caro. Jeunet’s trademarks include a quirky sense of humor; characters who exhibit slightly neurotic, ritualistic behavior or “magical thinking” (especially Amélie and Mathilde in Amélie and Un Long dimanche de fiançailles, respectively); obsessive collections (the narrator’s cousin in Foutaises; the diver in La Cité des enfants perdus; Nino in Amélie); and a preoccupation with feet (the large number of shots at ground level—and therefore of feet—in all of Jeunet’s feature films; the emphasis on the distinction between Louison’s enormous clown shoes and Julie’s tiny shoes in Delicatessen; Miette and One’s discussion in La Cité des enfants perdus in which shoes are used as a metaphor for conjugal union). Jeunet is renowned for his meticulous preparation and storyboarding, and his films have sometimes come under attack for a perceived lack of spontaneity. He has claimed, however, that he is not wedded to his storyboard: “‘I’m the first to say that a storyboard isn’t made to be respected but to be transcended. If an actor finds a brilliant idea or if you think of a way of shooting the same thing differently and better, then you have to change everything, no doubt about it. In other words, the storyboard is like a highway: you can turn off it from time to time to follow prettier country roads, but if you lose your way, you can always return to the highway’” (qtd. in Tirard 116).

The high degree of advance preparation, the emphasis on visual style, and the obvious influence of advertising and music-video aesthetics underscore Jeunet’s loose affiliation with the films and filmmakers of the cinéma du look. The cinéma du look emerged in the early 1980s, beginning with Diva (dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix; 1981), a cult film hailed by Fredric Jameson as the first “postmodern” French film (Jameson 55–62) that soon became the signature film of the look style. The directors most closely associated with the cinéma du look are Beineix, Luc Besson, and Léos Carax, who made a number of stylish thrillers characterized by sleek, colorful urban settings, a high degree of artifice, and what Sue Harris has called “a celebration of the visual and sensory elements of the filmic text” (Harris, “Cinéma” 219). The influence of commercials and pop-music videos can be seen in virtually every frame of look films such as Beineix’s Lune dans le caniveau (The moon in the gutter; 1983) and 37,2 le matin (Betty blue; 1986); Besson’s Subway (1985), Nikita (La femme Nikita; 1990), and The Fifth Element (1997); and Carax’s Boy Meets Girl (1984), Mauvais Sang (Bad blood; 1986), Les Amants du Pont-neuf (The Lovers on the bridge; 1991), and Pola X (1999). In these films, critics often commented, plot and character development seemed to be little more than pretexts for the dazzling visual display. In his study of Beineix, Phil Powrie describes the look effect as “the immersion of the spectator, not in some kind of ‘depth’ but paradoxically, in an infinite ‘surface.’ That surface is seen as the screen surface: the spectator does not go beyond the surface of the narrative, which functions more like a peg on which to hang the coat of style. The spectator does not go beyond the surface of the character, because it is not the psychological complexity of the character which gives pleasure, but the way in which the character behaves. In other words, what matters is what can be seen, what is presented, rather than what can be worked out, or constructed” (Powrie, Jean-Jacques Beineix 15). The emphasis on what can be seen also results in a fascination with technologies of vision and visual representation, especially in Amélie (telescopes and binoculars but also photography, painting, postcards, video, television, and cinema) and Un Long dimanche de fiançailles (in which point-of-view shots through microscopes, magnifying glasses, cameras, and the viewfinders of machine guns proliferate). Jeunet’s films offer a tremendous degree of surface pleasure, but what makes them so interesting for the film analyst is their imaginative use of the surface or “look” of the films as a vehicle with which to conceal and convey a great deal of information about contemporary cultural preoccupations, which, like Edgar Allen Poe’s purloined letter, can be hidden in plain sight.

Jeunet rose to prominence in the 1990s, when the cinéma du look had fallen out of favor, to be replaced by the social preoccupations of the cinéma de banlieue (emblematized by Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine; 1995) and the new realist aesthetic exemplified by such films as Sandrine Veysset’s Y aura-t-il de la neige à noël? (Will it snow for Christmas?; 1996), Bruno Dumont’s La Vie de Jésus (The life of Jesus; 1997) and L’Humanitié (Humanity; 1999), Eric Zonca’s La Vie rêvée des anges (The dreamlife of angels; 1998), and Robert Guédiguian’s Marius et Jeannette (1999). Jeunet’s background in advertising and music videos naturally predisposed him to the look aesthetic (or perhaps it was his look sensibility that first attracted him to advertising and music videos). There are incidental overlaps between Jeunet’s work and that of other look films, such as the presence of Dominique Pinon (who memorably played a smalltime thug in Diva) and the use of a location from Nikita for the exterior shots in Delicatessen. But there are also more fundamental overlaps, such as a shared emphasis on visual appeal, the extensive use of caricature, and repeated allusions to past film styles.

Jeunet’s invocation of a number of different eras in film history is one aspect of his collage aesthetic. This aesthetic is dramatized in the emphasis on reconstruction in Jeunet’s films—in its most extended narrative form in Un Long dimanche de fiançailles, in which Mathilde must piece together fragments of accounts of the war; but also in Alien Resurrection, when scientists reconstruct Ripley from fragments of “genetic material” found by her human predecessor’s remains; in Amélie, when Amélie cuts and pastes sentences to form a phony letter from her concierge’s dead husband, or when Nino must reassemble fragments of a torn photo to make out Amélie’s message about meeting up, or when Amélie forces Nino to “read” the series of photos of Amélie’s body parts like a rebus to learn of her desire to meet him. The collage aesthetic stems from Jeunet’s early work with Caro (Billy Brakko in particular) and develops in subsequent works, in which it takes two forms. The first form is the literal assemblage of fragments into a coherent whole in either a single frame (as in Billy Brakko, when we see various cartoon characters as well as a photograph of Marc Caro’s head pasted next to each other) or in a montage sequence (in Foutaises, Amélie, and Un Long dimanche de fiançailles). The second, more general form taken by Jeunet’s collage aesthetic is the mixing of media and genres from disparate sources. The collage aesthetic has its roots in surrealism but goes back in the French tradition at least as far as Michel de Montaigne, whose essays juxtaposed citations from a seemingly endless array of sources.

Jeunet’s frame of reference, like that of all filmmakers, is constructed from a wide range of cultural influences. In Jeunet’s case these influences are often unabashedly popular, including the work of the animator Tex Avery (the creator of the cartoon characters Porky Pig and Daffy Duck), the television series “Mission: Impossible,” the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, and the films of Jacques Audiard, whom Jeunet cites as his favorite contemporary director (Drubigny). Jeunet was also profoundly influenced by older cultural icons such as Jules Verne, the first and best-loved French science-fiction writer of the modern era; the poetic realist filmmakers Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné; and Federico Fellini, whose films depicting the oneiric underworld of the circus are evoked in Delicatessen and La Cité des enfants perdus. Related to the collage aesthetic is Jeunet’s penchant for elaborate, Rube Goldberg–like chain reactions, suggesting an interconnectedness among the vast array of human endeavor. Through editing, Jeunet emphasizes connections that would not otherwise be apparent. In what has become the most famous sequence of Delicatessen, the activities of cello practice, carpet beating, wall painting, toy making, and bicycle pumping all fall into step with the rhythms of the butcher’s lovemaking. In La Cité des enfants perdus, a teardrop triggers a series of events that culminates in the collision of a huge ship into a pier. And in Amélie, the disparate activities occurring at the moment of Amélie’s concept...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Prosthetic Visions
• Commentary By Jean-Pierre Jeunet
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index